difficulty copying and burning - please help me save my data

[astrojohn]

I had a bad system crash yesterday that left me with a non fucntioning WinXp. I put in the XP disc hoping to install a new version ontop of my old version. I had no luck, the installer couldn't see my partition information. I tried to boot into my Linux Mandrake partition with no luck either. MBR must have gotten fubared.

I have about 2gb of data I need to get off my Windows FAT32 partition. I've tried the following 3 things with no avail:

1) copying data from my C: to another partition. After about 100mb, the copying window just displays 'Stalled', yet my HDD light continues to stay light.

2) burning the data to a CD. I've tried this, I told K3b to use one of my other partitions as a the temp directory, in hopes of putting less load my RAM. About 50% done with the burn, it just stops and the disc ejects with an error communicating with the CD writer.

3) transfer through FTP. I setup BulletProof FTP on a system I have. I logged in using Konquerer, I transfered 80mb at about 10kb/s and then I get the 'Stalled' error again the transfer stops - yet the HDD light continues to stay light.

This is getting very frustrating.

I have an AMD Athlon XP 1600+, 512 PC 2100 RAM, 5gb free on a partition that I can use for temp space. I'm running Knoppix 3.3 off the CD.

Please help me, I'm desperate!!!

[bitey]

Sounds like a hardware problem -- your hard disk is bad. You're able to copy data fine until the drive head hits a file that's sitting on a bad spot. At that point, the computer will try over and over to read the data and "stall." This will happen regardless of which of the three methods you're attempting to use to recover your data (all of those methods will work, by the way).

Your best bet is to try to figure out which files are holding up the copy and then try to avoid those files. In other words, copy your data in small groups of files rather than in one big mass (yes, it is tedious).

See if your failing hard disk is still under the manufacturer's warranty -- some of them are covered for three years.